Every year, the marketplace of ideas (and products) gets more crowded with music, books, films, and TV. Every year, companies send us free stuff in a frantic bid to bribe us into paying attention to their specific ideas and products for just a few measly seconds. And every year, we boast here about all the fantastic…

Could you tell my boy to calm the heck down? Can’t seem to get him to get the difference between bestiality, necrophilia, and screwin’ a bearskin rug. Emphasizing my usual sexual interests—which involve rope bondage, floggin’, and an e-stim unit—hasn’t worked. Logic isn’t helpin’ out at all. Maybe you can help?

When we wrote about our favorite podcasts for the first time last year, we kept it casual: A core of A.V. Club podcast fans collaborated on a list of some of the best ones in rotation on our iPods. With the debut of our Podmass feature in February, though, we now had a large group of contributors listening to upwards…

Even more than most list-making endeavors, rounding up the best comics of the year is complicated. Does a single 32-page issue of an ongoing series belong on the same list as a 500-page novel? What about books that were published years ago in Japan or Europe but are just now making it Stateside? And where should…

Superheroes flooded movie screens, publishers transitioned to digital, and entire lines were rebooted in 2011, a turning point for the comic-book industry. The year started with Marvel and DC struggling to hold on to readers, with rising prices and event fatigue forcing drastic measures that significantly changed the…

Every year, The A.V. Club embarks upon elaborate voting rituals to determine the sorta-consensus best films, albums, and television of the year. But finding the best books of the year is a different experience. Since we cultivate the most eclectic selection of tastes we can for the book-review section in order to…

Each year, The A.V. Club scours the depths of our music slush pile in the quest for the least essential albums of the year. Though we wouldn’t call any of this music “good,” our goal isn’t to find the worst the year had to offer, but rather the music that had the absolute least real justification for existing, from…

‪We assembled our top-10 list in the usual way. All of the regular contributors to The A.V. Club’s game section made a bunch of ballots with numbers on them. We added the numbers up. We talked over the list and tweaked it. We cheated with a couple of ties, because we can.

‪The Sawbuck Gamer column, our recurring roundup of free and dirt-cheap games, is notorious for destroying readers’ productivity with the siren song of interactive procrastination. While you’re home for the holidays, however, it can serve an even nobler purpose: helping you ignore your relatives. Below are our…

As the means of producing music, books, and even films become cheaper and more accessible every year, the marketplace is increasingly crowded with culture, and the big companies are fighting to stay at the top of the heap. Fortunately for us, they often do this by taking advantage of their deep pockets and trying to…

Every year, The A.V. Club receives veritable tons of ridiculous promotional items, all of them vying for notice like a pack of screaming children begging for the slightest scraps of attention. This year, we decided to make the competition a little more literal by running down our top 10 swag items of the year. Here,…

We conclude our year-end countdown of the top 10 ridiculous promotional items we received this year. No, you can’t have them, but you can go watch part one of the swagdown here, or see many, many more items from our collection of 2011 swag in the annual Year In Swag write-up. Watch part one of the swagdown here.

It’s rare for the best series on television to attract huge audiences, but it’s equally rare for the very worst series to manage the same feat. Indeed, only three series out of the 10 worst of 2011 were renewed for second seasons, and all of those are on cable (evidently the best place to keep the worst and best TV…

Because we know your lives are too busy to read every single word we publish, and because now is the time of year for giving, we’ve decided to send you back into A.V. Club days of yore with some holiday-related links. These are stories from years past that pertain to the holidays, and that we think you’ll…

For the second year in a row, The A.V. Club looked at its year-end TV coverage and said, “Wait, there’s a lot of weird stuff that happened between the margins that can’t be summed up in simple ‘best of’ and ‘worst of’ lists.” In celebration of everything that falls between the sublime and the ridiculous—you know, like…

With the television industry’s entire yearly output accounted for and meticulously catalogued in lists of best series, memorable episodes, and arbitrary superlatives, a handful of The A.V. Club’s television writers sat down in our Chicago offices (one doing so via the Internet) to passionately defend and discuss their…

‪We try not to toot our own horns too loudly around here at The A.V. Club—we’re all nerdy wallflowers, after all—but we realize that you might’ve missed some fantastic things we published this year. In service of those words (and occasionally moving pictures), we’ve decided to gather some of our favorite articles from…

Can a luxurious setting make White Chicken & Buffalo Style Sauce go down easier? Our friends at Graham Elliot helped us find out if dollar-store food is any more palatable with the full fine-dining treatment. To see all of the cheap foods we subjected ourselves to—and to find out which one was full of living bugs—see …

Has it really been four years since The A.V. Club last wandered hopefully into a dollar store, seeking out the cheapest, most delicious foods we could find without actually contracting salmonella? Apparently it has been, and we aren’t sure why. What have we been eating in the interim, actual food? And in this era of…